Procrastination, or the artwork of doing the incorrect issues at one particularly incorrect time, has turn into a bugbear of our productivity-obsessed period. Losing assets? Everyone’s doing it! However losing time? God forbid. Schemes to maintain ourselves in effectivity mode—the rebranding of relaxation into self-care, and of hobbies into aspect hustles—have made procrastinating a tic that individuals are determined to dispel; “life hacks” now govern life. Because the anti-productivity champion Oliver Burkeman as soon as put it, “At the moment’s cacophony of anti-procrastination recommendation appears moderately sinister: a refined approach of inducing conformity, to get you to do what you ‘ought to’ be doing.” By that measure, the procrastinator is doing one thing revolutionary: utilizing their time with out intention. Take to the barricades, troopers, and once you get there, do completely nothing!
The novel has been sniffily maligned all through its historical past as a very potent car for losing time—until, in fact, it improves the reader indirectly. (See: the Nineteenth-century development of foolish feminine characters contracting mind rot from studying, which Jane Austen hilariously skewered with Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland.) Which makes Rosalind Brown’s tight, sly debut, Observe, a welcome reward for many who dither about their dithering. It presents procrastination as a significant, life-affirming antidote to the cult of self-discipline, whereas additionally giving the reader a scrumptious textual content with which to whereas away her leisure time.
In Observe, Annabel, a second-year Oxford pupil, wakes lengthy earlier than dawn on a misty Sunday morning “on the worn-out finish of January.” The day holds just one job—to put in writing a paper on Shakespeare’s sonnets—however Annabel is a routinized being and should act accordingly: “The issues she does, she does correctly.” So first she makes herself tea (espresso will rattle her abdomen) and leaves the radiator turned off to maintain the room “chilly and dim and filled with quiet.” She settles in with a plan: a morning spent studying and note-taking, a lunch of uncooked veggies, a solo yoga session within the afternoon, writing, a superbly timed post-dinner bowel motion. A day, briefly, that’s brimming with prospects for producing an optimized self. Besides that self retains getting in its personal approach: Her thoughts and physique, these dueling forces that alternately seize at our consideration, repeatedly flip her away from Shakespeare. Little or no writing truly takes place in Observe; Annabel’s vaunted self-discipline encounters barrier after barrier. She needs to “thicken her personal focus,” however as an alternative she takes walks, pees, fidgets, ambles down the unkept byways of her thoughts. She procrastinates like a champ.
Brown’s novel elevates procrastination into an important act, arguing that these pockets of time between stretches of productiveness are the place residing and creating truly occur. Which makes procrastination one of many final bastions of the inventive thoughts, a method to silently struggle 100 tiny rebellions a day. Screwing round, on the job and in any other case, isn’t simply revenge in opposition to capitalism; it’s a part of the work of residing. And what higher format for analyzing this anarchy than the novel, a type that’s created by underpaid wandering minds?
Observe is technically a campus novel, but it surely makes way more sense as a complement to the latest spate of office fiction that wonders what precisely we’re all doing with our valuable waking weekly hours. Some Millennial novelists, born in an period of prosperity after which launched into maturity simply as the same old signposts of success slid out of attain, have fixated on the office as a supply of our discontent. Many people had been informed in childhood that we are able to do something we wish, that “when you love what you do, you’ll by no means work a day in your life.” Work was imagined to be a promised land of success, a spot the place your aptitudes would flourish and—bonus—you’d receives a commission. However no job might stay as much as such a excessive normal. It doesn’t assist {that a} torrent of systemic points—insufficient well being care, drastic lease hikes, underfunding of the humanities—have left members of this era feeling like they’re dedicating 40-plus hours every week to treading water.
Current literature has been flush with examples. In Helen Phillips’s The Stunning Bureaucrat, a 20-something spends her workdays getting into inexplicable collection of numbers into “The Database” at a labyrinthine workplace. The job itself seems to be very important to humanity, however compensation, explication, and primary human dignity aren’t on supply. Halle Butler’s The New Me contains a 30-year-old working as a temp at a design agency, the sort of place populated by ash-blondes in “incomprehensible furry vests.” Her try-hard persona retains her from climbing the workplace social ladder, which in flip leaves her pathetically shuffling papers and slipping additional into loneliness, each at work and in her private life. The younger narrator of Hilary Leichter’s barely surreal Momentary takes gigs as a model, a human barnacle, a ghost, and a assassin—however all she actually needs is what she and the opposite temps name “the stability,” an existence during which work and life really feel benignly predictable. In line with these novels, the modern office turns us into machines, chops our mind into disparate bits, and fingers our valuable consideration over to the C-suite.
What’s lacking in every of those characters’ lives is the area for rumination, the mandatory lapses our brains have to stay creatively, regardless of our careers. Brown exquisitely spells out how procrastination is intrinsic to the imaginative course of. Regardless of her professed allegiance to a schedule, Annabel interrupts her personal routine early and infrequently. Simply after waking, she opens a window after which instantly needs she might expertise the sensation of opening it once more: “She needs to know precisely how the chilly blue mild feels when it begins to seem, she doesn’t need to miss a single element of the gradual daybreak, the reluctant winter morning.” Whereas settled at her desk below a cape-like blue blanket, she spends as a lot time contemplating methods to spend her time as she does truly spending it. She imagines her outdated tutor advising her to “look away from the textual content and out the window if it’s a must to, try to pause your thoughts on the one factor.” Positive, she jots down occasional adjectives to explain Shakespeare and the thriller lover he courts within the sonnets, however most of Annabel’s focus is within the second, within the rabbit gap of flippantly linked reminiscences and notions her mind accesses when it’s drifting off piste. Reasonably than flip her concepts into a piece product, she listens to a robin sing, thinks by an unconsummated relationship from the previous 12 months, and fondly recollects her time learning Virginia Woolf—a author who herself dwelled within the interstices of passing time.
Like Woolf, Brown understands that life is lived within the in-between moments, and that buckling down to provide a chunk of artwork doesn’t essentially have the supposed impact. (Anybody who has sat at a desk, determined for the phrases to come back, can affirm.) It’s no shock, then, that Annabel admires Woolf, whose churning novels of the thoughts revolve round bizarre actions which are typically waylaid by characters’ fancies and distractions. Mrs. Dalloway’s occasion planning finally ends up on the again burner as she considers alternate variations of her life; the Ramsay household fails to succeed in the tower at Godrevy in To the Lighthouse as a result of their musings intervene; the kids of The Waves spend as a lot time dallying as they do placing on their play. Equally, Observe locations Annabel’s choice making—what to put in writing concerning the sonnets, whether or not her much-older boyfriend ought to go to her in school—on the identical footing as her daydreams.
What Annabel senses, and Brown superbly drives house, is that it’s the unusual psychological collisions between the pondering thoughts and the wandering thoughts that yield probably the most fascinating outcomes. These are the moments when artistry sneaks in unbidden; Annabel understands that if artwork is created out of life, the latter has to have area to occur. She copies out a line from the poetry critic Helen Vendler: “A essential ‘studying’ is the tip product of an internalisation so full that the phrase studying shouldn’t be the precise phrase for what occurs when a textual content is in your thoughts. The textual content is a part of what has made you who you’re.” The inventive life isn’t about doling a self out into totally different parts—it’s about sitting within the stew that a complete life makes and providing your perspective on it.
Annabel’s day turns extraordinary, albeit in small methods. She breaks a treasured brown mug, the one factor she’d rescue in a hearth; this slash by her routine nearly makes her cry. She lastly decides whether or not to ask her boyfriend for a weekend, and perhaps invite him deeper into her life. A tragedy within the bed room subsequent door jerks her towards the understanding that every one lives are as difficult as her personal. She additionally ends the day with not more than some notes and some phrases on Shakespeare’s poems: “slick — bitter — nimble.” Who’s to say if she’s been productive or not?
The artwork of procrastination requires confrontation—with our inefficiencies, with the attract of straightforward pleasure, with the truth that time will sometime finish for us. However we are able to soften into it. We are able to let ourselves float within the in-between. Maybe with a significant, self-aware novel.
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